Clothes were
everywhere at Venice this year. Everyone wore them, on screen and off. In
some movies they took them off, then put them on again (Ang
Lee’s LUST, CAUTION). In others they put them on, then took them off. In
others still, the characters chose their clothes like chameleons artfully
responding to environmental prompts. Who can forget TildaSwinton’s Amazonian chic as a company lawyer in
MICHAEL CLAYTON, her jackets winged and buttressed as if initiating a Pallas Athene fashion line, or the neoclassical swains and
shepherdesses in Eric Rohmer’s LOVES OF ASTREE AND CELADON, dressed in Arcadian
prêt a porter, or the enchanted oddities (fish shoes, magic veils)
that served as everyday raiment in JiangWen’s THE SUN ALSO RISES.

Offscreen it was a little
different. There were real and regular mortals on the Lido – like me and my
colleagues – living in a real and regular world. Many or most of our clothes,
by statistical probability, will have been made in China. But even more
probably, none of our clothes were designed in China. Couturiers don’t
exist there; or none we’ve heard of; or none until now.

Then along comes Jia Zhang-ke’s WU YONG
(USELESS). This cracking essay on the garment trade won the Venice Film
Festival’s Best Documentary prize. It makes Jia a
two-in-a-row winner of high honours at the Mostra
del Cinema. Last year he got the Golden Lion for STILL LIFE, his tragicomedy
about China’s changing society in a time of economic acceleration and the
ruthless top-down destruction of old ways.

WU YONG also
responds to a changing country. Ma Ke, widely
dubbed China’s first fashion designer, has hand-created clothes that respond
to Chinese mythology, Chinese contemporary reality and the layers within
layers of Chinese history. The Paris fashion show where her creations are
first presented to an international audience is like something out of Kubrick’s 2001. Light bursts slowly, dawn-of-time style,
over a stage studded with immobile, pedestalled
figures garbed in primitive outfits of grey, brown and silver. It looks like
a multi-gender version of the Terracotta Army, or a convocation of characters
from some forgotten or never-existent folklore epic.

This isn’t how WU YONG begins,
though it’s the film’s most apocalyptic moment. Jia
Zhang-ke sets up his movie with scenes in a
sweatshop, the kind of clothing foundry with which outsiders are more likely
to associate China. In a hangar the size of Tiananmen Square – and to judge
by puddles and leak stains almost as open to the elements – human Nibelungs slave away at sewing machines. Lateral tracking
shots lay open this vast panorama (like a scene from a Fritz Lang movie) in a
slow, mute prelude. Soon we visit the canteen, the recreation hall, and the
factory’s medical clinic, kept busy with real complaints and injuries and
some that look like skyving. Finally, back in the Nibelungs’ hall, Jia’s camera
dollies in towards a single worktable in this hive of labour – which we have
now learned is the South China Garment Industry Building – to discover a lone
lady at work on clothes for, the labels read, ‘Emporio
Exception.’ It’s a little coup de cinema: she may be the only person slaving
for an artist-designer, rather than for a world-circling consumer chain, in
this whole mighty space.

‘Exception’ is an
early Ma Ke line. Her newest line, we learn when we
meet the designer herself, playing with her dogs at home, is called ‘Wu
Yong.’ Literally, in the film’s English-translated title, ‘Useless’.(‘Functionless’ might be a kinder
rendering). The clothes are wuyongbecause they are declamatorily, almost
Dadaistically non-pragmatic. They belong to no known fashion currency. They
include austere monkish tunics, cumbrous frocks with stiff toutou-style skirts, giant cloaks in what seems to be
embossed burlap. They are garments that could have been dug out from some
gigantic communal grave(with or
without their owners inside), caked and discoloured by mud and time. But
beautiful with it.

Useless? In a
way. I doubt we’ll see the average Chinese worker cycling around in this
stuff. Nor will the average suit-wearing Chinese boss swap his Armani-style,
Hong Kong-made knockoffs for one of Ma Ke’s
placeless, timeless brainstorms.

But for Jia
Zhang-ke the Wu Yong line is something more than a
candidate for the madhouse; and more, at the other extreme, than tomorrow’s
craze in the high street. It is, in every sense, a fashion statement.
“It’s a challenge to China’s rapid development and a kind of rebellion,” Jia has commented. “It challenges the obliteration of
memory, the over-exploitation of natural resources, and the speed at which
all this is happening.” (Exactly the themes of his STILL LIFE).

It challenges
them by hinting at a Chinese character and history that underlie all the
changes China has gone through. ‘Underlie’ in the sense ‘lie buried’. Some of
Ma Ke’s clothes were actually interred in earth for
a period to give them their own – as it were –narrative DNA. This Chinese essence that Wu
Yong seeks to express is a sort of forthright yeoman endurance laced with
mystical aspiration and transcendence. These garments belong, at one end of
the Chinese spectrum, to a landscape of yaks and yurts; at the other to the
grimly heroic survival instinct that has outlived early Maoism and is still
outliving its late, posthumous successor.

Says Ma Ke in the film’s notes: “I want to explore the value of
life through my clothes.” Says Jia Zhang-ke: “I’m
using clothes as a medium for looking at society.”

He is. Ma Ke’s work lies at the centre of WU YONG. But the film
doesn’t begin with it, nor end with it. The prelude is the gargantuan
sweatshop. Then comes the aspirational main
section, all about how clothes – the pun insists on being made – Ma Ke’th the man and how the man and woman, and their world
and history, Ma Ke’th the clothes. Finally the film
makes landfall in a humane and human postlude.

This closing
segment is about the plight of China’s village and small-town tailors, whom
mass production has pushed into Poverty Corner. Most of these people have
given up garment work altogether or stitch a fragile living from repairs and
alterations. It’s a contrast to the brief glimpse we get earlier of rich
matrons in Mainland China’s ‘Friends of Vuitton’
club, or even richer ones cooing about their Prada
and Dior collections.

As in his feature
films – UNKNOWN PLEASURES, THE WORLD, STILL LIFE – Jia
Zhang-ke has the gift of conjuring articulacy from
silence. His comment is to make no comment at all. He just sets different
stories next to each other. He pushes different groups of people into the
spotlight, one after another, and asks us to sit by the catwalk and mark our
cards.

It’s an uncanny
style for a movie on a deeply canny theme: the direction and destination of
China’s soul now that China, capitalism’s newest conscript, has done so much
to sustain its body. Jia has made a film of
apparent contradictions about a country of evident contradictions. The
paradox of WU YONG the movie is its determination to promote an elite and
presumably expensive fashion line in a movie that elsewhere decries greed and
consumerism. But this paradox dissolves as it becomes clear that the Wu Yong
garments are art objects – and look likely to remain so – rather than
shop-window items.

The paradox of
China herself is that it is dispatching its consumerism and culture to all
parts of the world but is still an anxiously secretive society with a
jealously dirigiste government. Is the birth of
fashion a new gap – a chink of enlightened individualism – in the wall of
philistine autocracy? Or will it be another means for China to sell its
‘progressive’ image abroad while keeping life regressive and repressive at
home?

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE
NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.